"A resident of Vladivostok, which is sandwiched between China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan, was adding ordinary coal to a fire when he noticed a shiny metal object peeking through a piece of the friable black rock."

Brian Thomas reviews accounts of possible evidence of artifacts. He excludes no possibilities:

"Maybe some ancient coal melded around a piece of modern machinery from Khakasis. Maybe an old explorer dropped an even older bronze bell down a well for miners to later extract from the mountains of West Virginia. And it is perhaps conceivable that coal somehow enveloped a more recently manufactured iron cup. These and other apparent human artifacts embedded in coal need more investigation. ...

And such investigations should include the possibility that these artifacts were produced by people who lived at the same time that vast forests were catastrophically buried to become coal."

Raison d'etre

In geological terms, a contact is the place where two different types of rocks come together. This ezine is a place to find content from my favorite web sources on the the creation-evolution issue, with a focus on the subject of geology. Just as the layers of a rock can be composed of many different materials, so my sources often differ in their assumptions and in their views on the issue, but their common intersection is the belief that this is an important subject.

While my interests are wide-ranging, as even a cursory glance at this site will show, a subject of great personal interest to me is the preservation of biological material in fossils presumed tens to hundreds of millions of years old. In my view, the increasing pace of discovery of such material is one of the strongest evidences in support of a young age for the earth.

Below is a continuously updated archive of articles I've found on the subject:

Cutting-edge creation research. Free. Answers Research Journal (ARJ) is a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework.

YEC Geo's insight:

The latest volume of Dr. Andrew Snelling's online-only technical journal. I found particularly interesting the articles on recumbent folds and flood year calculations.

Bird-like tracks in Argentina that were previously attributed to an unknown group of theropods are now assigned to Aves, simply on the basis of radiometric dating.

Here's the problem--if morphology is not sufficient to identify tracks as theropodian, how can we possibly decide which of the hundreds of thousands of Mesozoic tracks are birds and which are theropods? Obviously, it doesn't matter what they look like, only what their age is.

And if birds and dinosaurs both existed at the same time, and morphological characteristscs are insufficient for identification, as this article implies, then there's no way to tell for certain which tracks are from birds and which are from dinosaurs.

The damage to interstate highway bridges from flash flooding in Southern California's desert over the weekend proved more widespread than initially thought, with construction crews working Tuesday to reinforce spans over three gullies.

Built in 1967, the Tex Wash Bridge sits on Interstate 10, linking Los Angeles to Phoenix. Located just east of Palm Springs, Calif., the bridge is owned and maintained by the California Department of Transportation, or CalTrans. Officials there said they were investigating how a highly rated bridge managed to fail so spectacularly.

YEC Geo's insight:

What do the Indus, Mississippi and Yellow Rivers all have in common with this story? Channel migration--up to 300 miles at times, in the case of the Yellow River.

Just goes to show that there's more to the integrity of a bridge than it's engineering specifications. To paraphrase a well-known parable, if the foundations aren't sound, the bridge won't hold against the rising waters, no matter how well-constructed it is.

In this video, you'll see how powerful lava is. I especially loved the tree roots asploding. Pay close attention to the chain link fence as it burns - this stuff is so hot it sets metal afire! Also parking lots, tires, and, buildings. And the lavafalls - spectacular!

Gesturing with his hands, Spencer ended with a bizarre notion: “This is telling us that you do not need tidal heating to power ongoing, recent geological activity on icy worlds. That’s a really important discovery that we just made this morning.” The crowd applauded this open-ended statement that leaves unanswered the question, What, then, is capable of powering recent geological activity?

YEC Geo's insight:

Good question. David Coppedge, a former NASA Jet Propulsion Lab employee, gives a logical answer, beginning, "We didn’t expect our predictions to be confirmed so quickly. Well, maybe we did."

"The uniformitarian scientists claim that the Great Unconformity represents a long period of continental denudation, well over a billion years at many locations. This is in the context of attempting to explain the evolution of biomineralization by means of the geochemical effects of prolonged continental weathering and denudation. However, erosion does not form planation surfaces today, except locally when a river floods and erodes its banks.7 Planation surfaces are being destroyed by present-day erosion, especially by running water that forms channels and valleys."

YEC Geo's insight:

In a logically consistent uniformitarian paradigm, planation surfaces would not exist in solid bedrock. Examination of any topographical map shows that rivers incise, they do not plane. Flat depositional plains only exist in alluvial valleys, as a result of overbank flooding, and even then, channels are incised into the surface.

There is no reasonable way to use currently scaled erosional processes to produce a planation surface in, say, quartzite sandstone, for example.

Last week I postulated that the El Niño/El Niña effect was not due to solar or atmospheric conditions, but actually caused by underwater volcanic activity along ocean ridges off the West coast of South America. To see whether my theory held water I decided to look into the Argo Float data to see if there it was showing a warm upwelling of water in this region. I apparently was correct.

YEC Geo's insight:

An interesting discussion, mainly in the comments section, on whether underwater vents have a causative effect on El Nino.

"The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety has signed off on geology reports that found that no active earthquake fault runs under the site of the Millennium Hollywood development, even though the state geologist last year concluded there was one."

YEC Geo's insight:

Apparently, new studies concluded that the fault was "too old to be active." Let's hope they're right.

"When the Kepler Space Telescope team announced the closest match to Earth yet seen, a planet named Kepler 452b, reporters went berserk with the “cousin” metaphor and other comparisons making it sound like a second home."

YEC Geo's insight:

I thought maybe there was a fair amount of over-hyping going on--that looks to be the case.

Self-piloting drones like the Boomerang are leading a small but fundamental change in the industry. In oil and gas, equipment doesn’t move without data—where to drill, how deep to go, and so on. With the traffic bottleneck removed, suddenly equipment can move more nimbly and exploration startups can get in the drilling game for a fraction of the traditional entry cost.

This could represent a revolution in planetary science happening before our eyes. Everyone is saying these surfaces are “young” and all the experts are at a loss to keep them young-looking for billions of years.

YEC Geo's insight:

It'll be interesting to see how this new data is going to be interpreted.

As the Southwestern drought continues to take its toll on Lake Mead, ominous strips of pale rock aren’t the only hidden pieces of its past to emerge. A concrete plant, the abandoned Mormon enclave of St. Thomas and a Boeing B-29 superfortress bomber are among the historical relics long obscured by the lake’s surface that are enjoying renewed visibility—and renewed interest from tourists.

Not all of the Missoula floodwater was able to pass through a narrow gap in south-central Washington, so it backed up and formed an instant lake around 245 m (800 ft) deep in central Washington. This spread sediments up tributary valleys creating well-layered sedimentary deposits up to 30 m (100 ft) thick (fig. 2). This is a good example of how quickly thick layers can form in a flood.

YEC Geo's insight:

A textbook example of catastrophic deposition of thick sedimentary layers, with application to a global flood model. On a worldwide scale, planation surfaces, tall erosional remnants, and deep water gaps are all much more easily explained by a catastrophic global marine transgression than by the accepted actualistic/uniformitarian consensus.

"Allegations of water thievery are cropping up across California, as wells and creeks run dry in a punishing drought now in its fourth summer. But the penalties for suspected scofflaws, from the Bay Area to the Hollywood Hills, vary as much as the body types found in Lupin Lodge's skinny dipping pool."

YEC Geo's insight:

Expect to see more of this in more places, as water scarcity moves from being an inconvenience to becoming a more serious problem. Kind of like people siphoning gas from cars in the oil crisis of the late 70s.

More than 50 small earthquakes have been recorded since Wednesday near the town of Fillmore in Ventura County, according to a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist.

YEC Geo's insight:

Fillmore is located on the north bank of the Santa Clara River, which is remarkable for the width of the valley in relation to the actual width of the river (underfit, in other words). Here's a link to a map of the location, along with some interesting information about Fillmore: http://mapq.st/1H8bO5Q

For the more curious, here's a link to a free Google ebook about an early geologic investigation of the area: http://bit.ly/1Sd2eEk&nbsp;

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